Crack in the Sky (55 page)

“Yeah, Asa. You just hol’ on. The river ain’t far now.”

But he knew McAfferty wouldn’t make it … unless he cut the man. With a trembling hand Scratch reached around to the small of his back to drag the skinning knife from its rawhide sheath. His vision was blurring, his eyes stinging more and more from the sweat and the blowing sand: red, raw, bloodshot. Scratch didn’t know for sure if it was the salty drops seeping into them, or perhaps that his eyes were simply starting to melt, oozing out of their sockets and right on down his cheeks into the thick beard.

After he had blinked, and blinked some more, to clear them for a moment, Bass peered down to find McAfferty’s head slumped to the side, the man’s eyes half-closed, only the whites showing in that glare of brutal light.

Painfully, Scratch dragged his knees across the hardpan earth, scooting right up to Asa’s shoulder, where he
jabbed his left arm under his partner’s neck. With his fingers locked under McAfferty’s armpit, he heaved against the dead weight. That effort made his stomach threaten to hurl itself against his tonsils. He bent over the body, gasping as he squinted his eyes shut, then groaned, gritting his teeth the moment he heaved against the weight once more.

Succeeding in getting McAfferty’s shoulders propped against his thigh, Bass shuddered from that last terrible exertion. With a raspy sigh that felt as if he had swallowed cactus needles, Scratch dragged Asa’s far arm across his lap. Clamping the wrist in his left hand to steady it, he laid the sharp edge of the blade against the inside of the wrist … then suddenly found himself staring at that line where the dark saddle-leather-brown hide of the hand ended and the sunburned crimson began as it climbed up the man’s white skin.

He gritted his teeth, resolute.

Across that tan line he compressed the blade into the reddened flesh, struggling to focus his eyes again, to whip his mind back to the task before him … until he suddenly realized he was watching the man’s blood oozing from the laceration.

“Asa,” he gasped in hope. “Here, Asa.”

Letting the knife spill from his right hand, Titus grasped hold of McAfferty’s chin at the same time he raised the bleeding wrist toward Asa’s mouth.

Rubbing the wound against the cracked lips, Scratch murmured, “Here. Suck, Asa. Suck, dammit!”

But his partner did not move.

In despair Bass rubbed the wrist back and forth over the dry, cracked lips, still without response from McAfferty. Titus dropped the wrist and slapped a flat hand across Asa’s cheek.

The eyes fluttered, clenched, then slowly opened as McAfferty’s thick, blackened tongue came out to lick at the lips.

“That’s your blood, dammit!” Scratch whimpered down at his partner. “Suck … suck it now or you’re … you’re done.”

It took all he had left in him to grab the wrist again
and drag it to Asa’s mouth, holding it there against the lips as McAfferty’s eyes closed and his lips parted, tongue flicking out to taste the blood. Then Asa finally began to suck on the wound, swallowing slowly.

For the longest time Titus watched McAfferty draw at his own blood before Asa turned his head and attempted to gaze up at Bass, his eyes slowly swimming, rolling.

“G-get us to … water. Get water.”

With the deadweight of a sack of meal, Asa’s head went limp across Bass’s arm.

Unable to support it any longer, Scratch pulled his arm free, gasping for air as if his lungs were filled with hot coals. Squatting there by the body of his partner, Titus stared down at his own wrists. Then he peered over at the bloodstained knife lying by his knee.

The antler handle had a strange, foreign feel in his hand as he scooped it from the ground. A sensation not quite real as he laid the knife lengthwise along his own wrist and without hesitation pressed it down until his watery eyes finally noticed the blood seeping up on either side of the narrow blade already crusted with sparkling particles of sand.

Surprised that there was no pain, Scratch continued to ease the blade down into his skin, opening himself up even more. As the dark fluid began to bead and tumble off his forearm, Titus yanked the wrist to his mouth, began sucking noisily. His eyes fluttered half-closed in that feral way of an animal savoring the warm, moist nourishment of its prey.

Blood thick as his mam’s Kentucky sugarcane molasses. So warm against his lips, oozing back upon his tongue. He swallowed, sensing himself gag, feeling his stomach lurch in revolt. Desperate, he shoved the bile back down, his throat stinging with the acid’s burn, its fiery aftertaste, and kept on sucking.

At the back of his neck he became aware of the fire against his skin. Revived enough now to raise his head, Bass turned and glanced at the path the sun was taking into the west. They might just stand a chance now …
make it through till nightfall. But they damn well needed shade until the sun had limped from the sky.

“H-hannah,” he whispered, able to coax no more out of his throat.

Sucking some more on his wrist, Titus used the tip of his tongue to smear that blood over his lips until they were moistened, then tried to whistle. Nothing more than a faint shrill sound. Beginning to feel hopeful at this small success, Bass watched the half-dead mule roll her big head to the side and peer over at him.

He licked the lips again and whistled. This time she obediently started to turn his way. Then stopped.

“Hannah,” he croaked.

She came on around with his coaxing. The mule worked unsteadily at those next few steps, turning slightly, picking up one hoof at a time beneath her burdens, finally drawing close enough that he could reach out with his bloody arm and grab for the lead rope. On the fourth try he captured the braided rawhide and looped it around the hand. Now he was able to nudge her closer, eventually turning her so that she stood nearly on top of them to block the bright light. So hot had the direct rays become that this sudden shadow seemed like the cooling breath carried by a spring breeze.

It surprised him when his saddle mount came over to join the mule. Nor was it long before one of McAfferty’s packhorses came over to join the others. He let himself collapse to the side in relief. A good thing it was, he thought as he let his head rest atop his elbow on that hot ground—good that horses were a damned sight more sociable than he was.

There in the collective shade made by those near-dead animals, Scratch closed his eyes and sighed, letting his mind drift now that his tongue wasn’t near so swollen with thirst, now that he could feel some saliva beginning to work up at the back of his throat, around that tiny pebble he had stuffed under his tongue back near sunup. In a while he figured he just might have enough strength to get up and cut a horse’s ear for McAfferty.

Not … right now.

In a while.

On that August morning—what seemed like ages ago now—he and McAfferty had hastened back to Hatcher’s camp, eager to announce their plans to set off on their lonesome to the others, who were trudging over groggily to settle by the fire and swill down some steaming coffee.

“Here I thought you was a happy man being part of us!” Caleb Wood sputtered, the first of them to protest.

Elbridge Gray shook his head woefully, pursing his lips until he exploded, “Can’t believe you’d up and leave us now, Scratch—after all we been through together for the last two years!”

Isaac agreed. “And after all we done to take you in with us!”

Their reactions making him feel the first pangs of regret, Scratch nodded and said, “I’ll always be a grateful man, fellas—for all you done by me. But don’t get it wrong just ’cause I aim to make my own tracks now. I’m beholden to you, for always.”

With that sentiment encouraging them, Caleb, Isaac, and Elbridge did their best to caution Scratch against pulling up his stakes and setting off alone with Asa McAfferty.

“Goddammit, Bass,” Simms growled, smearing drops of coffee collected in the broom bristle of his whitish-blond mustache. “You damn well know how many times we had a scrap with the Blackfoot our own selves in the last two years.”

Gray nodded vigorously. “And now you wanna set off with just the two of you niggers!”

“We ain’t going nowhere near Blackfeet country!” McAfferty protested after remaining silent for so long.

But Wood ignored the white-head, jabbing a finger at Bass instead, just as that turkey-wattled schoolmaster back to Kentucky had jabbed once too often. “Pick up and move off from us, Scratch? And here I thought you was our friend!” Caleb glared a moment at McAfferty.

“This don’t mean I ain’t your friend no more—”

Wood fumed, “But I guess you ain’t our friend, are you, Scratch! I s’pose now I can see just how your stick floats—”

“A man does what he thinks best,” Jack Hatcher interrupted the tongue-lashing, immediately shushing them all. “Bass allays been that sort to take the circle. Even though I don’t agree with him one whit … I’ll trust to what Scratch thinks best for hisself.”

“Y-you mean you’re gonna let him go off like this, Jack?” Rufus asked, his voice rising an octave in disbelief.

Hatcher didn’t answer all that quickly. Instead, his unwavering gaze landed on McAfferty. Then he said, “I’ll trust in both of ’em, boys. Ye ’member we rode with both of these men of a time.” Then his eyes came over to fix on Titus. “And now it ’pears that the time for us to ride together’s come to an end.”

“Don’t mean we reached the knot at the end of our days together,” Bass replied, his throat filled with sentiment, suddenly sensing the ghostly presence of so many of those who lived on now only in his memory.

“Ye leaving us … it’s been coming for some time,” Jack explained. “I seen it plain as prairie sun. Some folks need others around ’em all the time—like the rest of these boys. Then … there’s folks like you, Titus Bass. The sort of man what does best left on his own.”

Those words reverberated someplace within him now, like the waves of heat rising off the cast-iron surface of this land.

Scratch didn’t know how long he had been lying there with his eyes closed, his half-cooked mind numb from the dizzying heat, his thoughts running in this direction, then that, just the way Hannah would urinate on this baked and flinty ground, the hot yellow piss streaming off in one little rivulet, then a second, and then another speeding there, finally a fourth narrow dribble fingering across the merciless, endless crust of the flaky sand.

With a cold seizure of his heart, Scratch wondered if he had made a mistake—come so far into this devil’s fry pan to die with McAfferty. Maybeso he came only to prove something to himself.

Could he make it on his own hook?

Or was the real problem that he doubted he would ever be able to trust in another man as fully as he had
trusted in those three before they disappeared with near everything he had labored for?

And while he was questioning himself and what he had done: should he have followed McAfferty out of rendezvous back in August? Or had he only been blinded by the prospect of virgin beaver streams where no white man had ever laid a moccasin?

In the end, was he cut out for making it on his own hook?

Hearing Asa groan, Bass reluctantly opened his eyes. It was still shady on him. Peering up, he could see that all of their five animals remained around them. What a sight he and Asa must make, and he tried to chuckle in that taut, sunburned face of his. Out here where nothing green grew tall enough to brush a horse’s belly, their little tableau would stand right out on the flat, baked desert for many miles around. Those horses and that mule ringing two near-dead, completely stupid niggers … a pair of men waiting for the buzzards to come circling above them in the clear, pale, steamy sky. Waiting for those naked brown Apache to pick up their trail again.

“B-bass.”

It took some doing, but Titus slid his head off his arm, raised himself on an elbow, and made his face hover somewhere over McAfferty’s.

“Night c-coming?” Asa asked as the shadow crossed his eyes.

“Not near soon ’nough.”

McAfferty’s brow sagged with despair. “God d-deliver us …”

Bass waited a while, then admitted how likely it was that McAfferty was sleeping again. As much as he wished he could, something down inside his gut nagged at him the way a tiny cockleburr got itself hitched under a saddle blanket and chafed the animal, irritating the horse’s hide until that animal fought to throw off its torment.

Licking his lips, Scratch again tasted the blood. Blinking, he found that this time his eyes did not sting with sweat, nor swim with blurry images. Grunting, Titus straightened, sitting right up beside McAfferty in that
shady ring of horseflesh. Alongside his head hung the wide wooden stirrup on Asa’s Mexican saddle. It would do about as good as anything.

Seizing it first in one hand, then with the other, Bass took a deep, hot breath and began to pull himself onto his knees. The weakened horse whinnied, protesting at the sudden shift of weight on its saddle as the animal peered back at him.

“There … there, there,” he tried to coo.

Astonished to discover he was already up on one knee, Titus pulled with his arms, pushed with his legs, lunging up with an arm to snag that wide dish of the saddlehorn. Pulling still more as his knees began to straighten, his head suddenly fuzzy again, light as cottonwood down.

He gasped in surprise, relieved to find that he was standing.

Forced to squint into narrow slits now that he was no longer protected in the horses’ shade, Scratch peered across the distance—struggling to focus through the shimmering, dancing heat waves streaming up from the monotonous ground and that ocean of low brush struggling just to survive beneath a fiery sun. Then he turned slightly, clinging desperately to the saddlehorn with that one hand, the other arm draped around the cantle. Slowly he turned a little more, gazing far, far out into the distance. Checking for a smudge of dust, looking for any betrayal of black, beetlelike forms swimming watery along the shimmying horizon. He did not allow himself another deep breath of the superheated air until he had peered in all directions.

Nothing. Almost as if he and Asa and their animals were the only living things for hundreds of miles around. But, then, he knew better. The Apache were somewhere out there. Following on foot through the broken country. Likely the red bastards had already reached this flat, endless stretch of valley at the base of the rocky mountainside and were coming on. Tracking the white men and their half-dead animals.